Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, is worried about the giant mercenary firm’s latest foray into private intelligence. “They’re marketing their services to not only foreign governments, but to Fortune 500 corporations,” he recently told an interviewer.

The forthcoming paperback edition of Scahill’s book on Blackwater, which appeared in hardcover in February 2007, will include 100 pages of new material, including a discussion of last September’s shooting spree in Baghdad by Blackwater operatives — which killed 17 Iraqi civilians but for which nobody has ever been charged.

“This is a company that has been accused of murdering Iraqi civilians,” Scahill pointed out, “of shooting the bodyguard to the Iraqi vice-president, of causing blowback attacks on United States troops, of hurting the morale of the United States military — that has cost United States taxpayers over a billion dollars for its operations in Iraq.”

However, Scahill’s greatest concern at present appears to be Blackwater’s venture into the private intelligence business.

“Blackwater started a private intelligence company,” he explained, “a private CIA essentially, called Total Intelligence Solutions. And the man running Total Intelligence Solutions is J. Cofer Black. He’s a thirty-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency. He also was the guy who ran the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program, the government-sanctioned kidnap-and-torture program.”

“His thirty-year CIA career, his network of contacts, his knowledge that was gained through his work in the most sensitive areas of the United States government is now on the open market for hire,” Scahill said sadly.

“This isn’t a liberal or conservative thing,” concluded Scahill. “You have a lot of traditional conservatives who are outraged at what they see as the degradation of the United States armed forces. … This has everything to do with the future of war-making and global stability.”

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

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I read Scahill’s book on Blackwater, also watched a lot of his videos and interviews on youtube. Scahill only gives about 1/3 of the real stories he is talking about to make contracting companies look as bad as possible. I have looked up and read a lot of the stories he has in his book and he just manipulates the truth so lazy bloggers can make ignorant accusations. For example a video of Blackwater contracters on a roof getting fired upon and could very well be overrun are shooting back one happens to say that is “like a turkey shoot” if you actually watch the entire video and read the interviews about it from bystanders in the compound if it wasnt the contractors more Americans would be dead.

And if the present administration had had the guts to tell the American people that we’d need more troops and higher taxes to pay for them, then Blackwater and other so-called “contractors” would have no reason to exist. We’d already have the troops we need over there, and at a far lower cost and with far fewer ethical problems. We’d also have retained some respect in the international community as well.

Reliance on mercenaries to perform basic combat functions of the military is one of the factors that destroyed Rome. It’ll be our undoing as well.